Fingerstyle, blues, vintage jazz, ragtime and roots guitarist Mike Dowling is not only at home in a wide range of music genres, he’s also equally at home on any number of guitars including the flat top, archtop and resonator. Also a longtime songwriter who has written songs for folks like Del McCoury, Kathy Mattea, and Emmylou Harris — penning some of those songs with his wife Jan — Dowling’s music career started back in 1970, when he left college to play guitar full-time and never looked back. The late legendary bluegrass, country, jazz, swing and pop fiddler Vassar Clements called Dowling, “One of the finest guitarists there is, anywhere.” Dowling will play Saturday night at Pacifica Performances. (He will additionally teach a guitar workshop prior to his concert.)

The guitarist, who also sings, will bring three guitars in different tunings, and two of those guitars will be National resonator guitars. About 40 percent of the songs he’ll play will be originals, with the other 60 percent covering a wide range of “great old artists” such as Lonnie Johnson, Danny Barker, Tampa Red and Duke Ellington.

Dowling, who lives in Wyoming, grew up in Wisconsin. He first learned about the structure of songs from piano lessons he took when he was 10. When he was 12, he heard some of his dad’s college students “jamming for fun” on guitar, and he was fascinated by the idea of just playing and creating music. His dad bought him a guitar.

“I was a self-motivated student and I spent hours in my room listening to records, trying to figure out what the guitar player was doing,” Dowling said. “I imagined that I was a real ‘picker.'”

By the time Dowling was 13 he was completely into guitar.

“My dad went from being concerned that I wouldn’t finish the second Mel Bay guitar book he’d bought for me, to being alarmed that I would never put the guitar down,” the guitarist laughed.

Almost completely self-taught, the guitarist did spend some time under the tutelage of the world-renowned swing guitarist George Barnes in 1977.

“I was already a professional musician and George took me on as a student for a few months before he died,” Dowling recalled. “He had a little teaching studio in Concord, CA, at the time, and was gigging with his new quartet. It was amazing getting to play with him and I still have those lessons on tape.”

By that point in time, Dowling had also gone on the road with Vassar Clements’ first touring band.

“Vassar was one of the best musicians I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with,” Dowling said, “and not just fiddle. Vassar was a fine guitar player. I moved to Nashville in 1975 to go on the road with him. The great steel player, Doug Jernigan, was in that band too — just great guys to hang out with and play music.”

Along with playing all over the U.S., Dowling has done a lot of Nashville session work, which includes his first Nashville session gig, playing on Clements’ Grammy-nominated “Hillbilly Jazz.” His guitar has additionally taken him all over the world. This year, he’ll play France and Italy in May. In July, he’ll head to Germany and Hungary to teach. For nearly 20 years, he’s been teaching guitar out of his residency school for private master instruction in northwest Wyoming. He and his wife Jan, who has been his manager and business partner since 1991, opened Wind River Guitar in 1995. Through his Wind River Guitar label, Dowling has released eight critically-acclaimed albums, and he shares a Grammy for his contribution to a Henry Mancini compilation recording called “Pink Guitar.”

Dowling considers his life with the guitar, a “journey, not a destination.”

“I’m fortunate to be able to teach guitar as well as play,” Dowling said. “I’m also a trained repairman and I specialize in restoring old resonator guitars. Almost everything I do is guitar related — teaching, performing, composing, restoring — so I pretty much have a guitar in my hands, most days, one way or another.”

“There are an impossible number of things to learn on guitar,” Dowling continued. “So I enjoy the journey, knowing that I will never quite get where I want to go.”

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